One of Rich’s paintings displayed at Morrison Hotel Gallery

Could you talk a bit about going on tour with Bad Company this summer?

About a year ago, there was talk of doing a possible Free reunion, and then Andy Fraser died and it didn’t happen. I’ve always been a huge Paul Rodgers fan, a huge Free fan, a huge fan of Simon Kirke, Paul Kossoff and Andy Fraser. Before Christmas, I went to honor Jimmy Page at the Experience Music Project where he was an honored member. It was Duff McKagan and I, the drummer from The Screaming Trees [Barrett Martin] who’s a really cool guy , Kim [Thayil] from Soundgarden, Jerry Cantrell from Alice in Chains, Krist Novoselic from Nirvana and a bunch of people like that who were there to play Jimmy’s songs for him. They asked me to do it, and it was cool. I flew my friend John Hogg out to sing and it was great. That’s where I met Paul [Rodgers]. Paul came up to do a couple of Firm songs, and he saw me at soundcheck and wanted me to play on his song. So that was it. It was great to be able to meet him. Then I got a call that Mick [Ralphs] couldn’t do the tour, so they asked me if I would fill in and I was like, “Yeah, that would be fucking great.”

Have you guys played together before?

Nope. It starts May 5th in Chicago. I know the first show is in Dallas, but we’re doing something in Chicago, so it should be really cool.

Have you done that before, filled in for someone in another band, especially for a whole tour?

Never, so that’s what’s going to be interesting. I don’t know, I think it’ll be cool for me. I don’t have to do anything; it’s not my band. I just have to learn the songs and get up and play, which will be great. I don’t have to do a damn thing except for play, which is fun.

Switching mediums here, you’re also a painter, and you’ve had some paintings up in New York’s Morrison Hotel recently. Have you always done that?

I’ve done it for about 25 years. I have had about five or six or seven shows. One was up for six weeks in a gallery in Atlanta, which is cool because they had about 20 pieces. This is at Morrison Hotel Gallery and it’s 20 new pieces I’ve never shown before. I just finished them before we came up. There’s four right now hanging in a gallery in Toronto, and then I did a couple of shows in Connecticut and a show in a Malibu.

I’m curious about people who do multiple artistic endeavors—is it something where you have to give time to music and then kind of put that on the side to do the art, or is it something you can do together?

I just kind of do it. It’s peaceful to me. There’s no band, there’s no politics. It’s easy—well not easy, in the sense that there’s always a journey to get where you want it to be, but it’s pleasant, because you just get to get in there and create this thing off of a blank canvas, which is very meditative to me in a sense. I get lost in it.

Would you equate doing a painting to writing a song or are they completely different things?

I think, for me, it’s different, because they are both supposed to elicit a feeling, but there is something about the visual aspect that is different. I do abstract work with oil—it’s an interesting way. Music is subconscious; there is no explanation to the actual musical side of things. Everyone has their own relationship with any kind of creative endeavor that they appreciate. Whatever I meant when I wrote “Thorn in My Pride”, whoever is a fan of that song has their own attachment to it, their own relationship to that song based on their filters and their life. I find painting is the same way. I see things in it, I know when it’s done and I know what kind of feeling it elicits for me when my work is done and I see it up there, but someone else can come in and see something totally different. That’s what’s really cool about it. That, to me, is what it’s about.

Could you talk a little bit about what we can expect from your new album, The Ceaseless Sight ?

I went up to Woodstock again and made this record. I kind of took the approach to the last record and took it to the next level on this one. I didn’t have anything really going into the studio. Last record I had a few ideas, nothing concrete, and I wanted to use the studio to kickstart, bring that energy. It was cool and it worked really well and I was really happy with it. With this record I went in with even less. I’m like, “Let’s just go in and see what happens.” There’s always that journey. There’s a high and there’s a low and then you come back out again and you go through this struggle, because you’re trying to pull something out that you can’t describe. It’s like, “I can’t say what I don’t like about it, I just know I don’t like it,” and then it shifts, like I said earlier, and something great comes out of it. I really like that approach.

Do you prefer writing in the studio versus outside of it?

Well, I think that, in a sense, there’s an urgency to being in the studio and coming up with something, because you have to get it done. Also, you’re in a place to be creative. I have three small babies—five, four, and three months, so trying to write in that scenario is kind of difficult. You want to be elsewhere, too—I want to do this and I want to see them—so when you go into the studio, this is what it is.

That’s the funny thing man, ProTools and these types of things are really convenient and they’re cool, but it’s never going to replace a studio. Studios were invented to be creative places. They were invented to sound good. I don’t care how many fucking apps you have on your ProTools, there’s still the physics of the air, the physics of space, and there’s also a feeling that will come from you as a musician by being in this place that was created [for you] that ProTools or these things will never reach. Although, like I said, do I like having thirteen thousand songs on my phone? Yeah, it’s kind of cool, but I’d prefer to always sit down to listen to vinyl. It’s convenient and it’s cool, and when I want to hear something when I’m flying, that’s great. There’s something more real and authentic to siting and listening to something and giving it your attention.

Since this was written all in the studio, how do you think the music that came out of that compares to the last album?

I think it’s the next step. There’s always a journey involved. The cool thing about The Crowes or what I’ve done for 25 years now, it’s a gift. Some bands are forced into this place because they’re big and they want to stay big. We kind of shot ourselves in the foot from a commercial standpoint, but we always lived and wrote the records we wanted to write. You can look at [1990’s] Shake Your Money Maker, which was a great record. I was nineteen when I wrote most of that, and seventeen when I wrote “She Talks to Angels.” [1992’s] The Southern Harmony, that was a huge growth for the band—we went on tour for 22 months and played 350 shows and we made that record and that was a left turn. Then we do [1994’s] Amorica, which is a much deeper record—with not one ounce of consideration was for any kind of commercial viability. Then Three Snakes —I mean fuck, man, to just record those four records, and to have this band and the way that I’ve always written and the way that we’ve always existed and to grow like that musically… Maybe it wasn’t the most commercially viable thing for us to do, but we knew no other way—it’s just what we did. So, that’s how I’ve always done it and that’s how I’ll always do it.

Some people say, “I know how to write a hit”—no one knows how to write a fucking hit. You can write some sort of weird formulaic bullshit—who fucking cares—but I can only write for myself. I don’t know what the fuck anyone else likes. The writing of this music and the creation of these songs or the creation of a record is self-expression. I’m expressing something, and my way is this way. My son’s way of expressing is writing. Everyone has their own way of expression. You can even be an accountant and express yourself. There is joy that accountants get after seeing some sort of spreadsheet that makes sense. That’s no less valid. To appreciate that as a form of expression and then to create your own relationship with that work, that’s what it’s all about.

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